Knowing How to Get There

One of the first things I do when I start out on a trip is to check out MapQuest. I know where I am, and I know were I want to go, but deciding what route to take can be difficult. I remember one vacation where I decided to take the shorter road from Idaho to Jackson Hole Wyoming. After six hours of mountain road, it was obvious that the other route would have taken considerably less time even though it was an extra 150 miles. Now MapQuest tells me what road to use, how long to stay on it and where to turn. Knowing where you are going is important, but knowing the best way to get there can sure save you a lot of time and effort.

The council and leadership of our church have been working for some time trying to understand where we as a church are going. To clarify this we have focused on our purpose and our mission. These two things tell us where we are going and what kind of a church God wants us to be. A copy of this working document is printed in this months courier. This purpose statement is the center of this document and gives us a good idea of where we are going. Our Purpose, (Who God has called us to be) is to be an inviting, life-changing community in Christ where people experience God in worship, in spirit and in relationships. This gives us direction, but just like my experience on vacation, knowing the best way to go is pretty important.

If we were trying to get from one place to another we could just get directions. So where do we find a MapQuest for Church direction? Tools like this are few and far between for churches. There are lots of people that will tell you how they got to where they are. Every pastor of a large church feels obligated to write a book detailing his or her success. The problem with these books is all of these churches started their journey at a different place. Though we can learn from them, if we try to use the experience of these churches as "driving directions" we can end up lost. What we need is a way to find out just where our church is at the present time and use that information to plot our course toward where we feel God is leading us.

The Natural Church Development Survey we have just finished is the first tool I have found that helps us get precisely the information we need to help us determine our direction. Not only will it tell us which way to turn at a particular time, by using the survey at regular intervals it can tell us when we have accomplished that goal and need to change emphasis. This tool was developed from a doctoral thesis that studied active healthy churches all over the world.

Using this information thousands of churches were studied and a number of quality characteristics essential to the health of any church were discovered.

These elements are:

1. Empowering Leadership
2. Gift Oriented Ministry
3. Passionate Spirituality
4. Functional Structures
5. Inspiring Worship
6. Holistic Small Groups
7. Need Oriented Evangelism
8. Loving Relationships

By measuring these quality characteristics our church leadership can see the best way to proceed. In that way we can concentrate our energy on the element where the Church is least effective and have the most effect. An example used to illustrate this is the "Minimum Barrel." If you improve the church's performance on the minimum factor it allows the congregation to grow to a new level, just like raising one of the rungs of the barrel allows the bucket to hold more water when the shortest stave of the barrel is raised Timely information like this helps our leadership set priorities correctly. It gives us the ability to choose the most effective route to becoming the kind of church that God wants us to be.

As I write this, the information for the Natural Church Development assessment is being processed. As soon as we receive the results I will make sure that the congregational profile is available to every one. The direction of the ministry should concern all of us. God has trusted us with an important message of priceless grace. We have an important responsibility.

Jesus' resurrection was the event that moved him from a life that is always shadowed by death to a new life in the presence of God that has no boundaries, no limit. We need to pray that God will help us to remove the obstacles that are preventing our church from carrying out the trust God has given us to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ. Finding our way from where we are as a congregation and moving toward our goal is the only way can become the Resurrection people God has called us to be.

Pastor Jim Bliss